Blog Archives
Grandfather and Grandson
The Corridor follows a grandfather with vast knowledge of the Blue Ridge Mountains who sets out on a mission alongside his teenage grandson to document a wildlife corridor threatened by a resort development. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I really wanted to do a reverse mentorship piece. I live in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I see all the time grandfathers showing grandchildren the nature that surrounds us here. I thought it would be fun to explore a different type of relationship. One where Ellias, the grandson, takes exception to Richard, the grandfather’s, lack of motivation on saving the wildlife corridor, even when he has economic reasons, property values, and the knowledge to save it. This shift happens not only in Ellias’ familiarity with social media and technology but also in motivating Richard to do something. This is a wonderful dynamic between grandfather and grandson.
Richard’s emotional arc is so understated but powerful. How did you approach writing a character whose growth happens through small shifts rather than dramatic revelations?
That is something I like to present while writing. I think it’s important for writers to engage their readers by not presenting the obvious but to deliver it in such a way that it’s believable, and hopefully they understand this the way you did.
Nature writing can sometimes overpower character, but here, landscape and psychology feel inseparable. How did you balance the two?
That’s a great question. And the answer is that I see daily the subtle balance between people and nature. I see a family of black bears crossing the street, and people stop their cars, being very respectful to let them pass. Pulling their phones out recording the encounter. It truly is magical, and while writing, I can’t help but bring that perspective. And I’m happy that you noticed.
If Richard and Eli met again ten years later, what do you think each would have taught the other by then?
Ah, you are skipping ahead. The Corridor is the first book in a 6-book (novelette) series…stay tuned.
Debt
Wade Parrish’s Debt is a bleak and funny literary novel about Bill and Kaelyn, two overworked New York lawyers whose love is being slowly crushed by student loans, corporate law, family damage, class panic, and the constant arithmetic of survival. The story begins after one of Bill’s colleagues dies by suicide, a death that becomes less an isolated tragedy than a warning flare from the life Bill and K are already living. From there, the novel follows their engagement, their work in the machinery of private equity, their fraying tenderness, and the increasingly grotesque bargains they make to escape the Debt that has come to define them.
I really enjoyed the voice. It’s frantic, hilarious, disgusted, and weirdly exact. Parrish writes corporate language as if it were a parasitic fungus growing over the soul, turning ordinary grief into defined terms and moral collapse into cleanly formatted clauses. I found the book exhausting in all the right ways. It does not merely describe burnout; it reproduces the claustrophobia of it, the way every email, subway platform, family call, and wedding expense becomes another small creditor tapping on the glass.
I also admired how the novel refuses to let Bill and K become simple victims. They are trapped, but they are also vain, cruel, evasive, funny, loving, cowardly, and sometimes monstrous. That complexity gives the book its serrated power. The satire is brutal, but the romance underneath it is not fake. Their love feels like two people clinging to each other in a flooding basement, aware that they may be holding one another under as much as keeping one another alive.
I recommend Debt to readers of dark comedy, corporate and class satire, legal fiction, and psychological drama, especially those drawn to books about ambition, money, burnout, and moral compromise. Readers who enjoy the corrosive social intelligence of Bret Easton Ellis or the workplace despair of Joshua Ferris may find a harsher, more legally intoxicated cousin here. Debt is a love story written in red ink, and every page knows exactly what survival costs.
Pages: 166
Boost Mental Health
Healthy Relationships presents a thoughtful and approachable exploration of what helps relationships thrive, walking readers through the core ingredients of healthy connection, communication, boundaries, empathy, responsibility, and self-awareness. Why was this an important book for you to write?
Mental health is an important subject for me especially because I work as an inpatient psychiatric nurse. We all could use more help with our journey to stable mental well-being, including myself. I learn things from every Nurse Dorothea® book I write. We plan to produce about 80 Nurse Dorothea® books (currently there are 15 as of April 2026), so it was time to cover this topic.
Relationships are complex, and I appreciate that you covered friendships, family ties, romantic partnerships, and online relationships. How did you approach writing about such a diverse topic, but still presenting meaningful information without being overwhelming?
I practice the skill of synthesis of reading a lot of research-based information and combining it all to create a thorough product. The Nurse Dorothea® books are much harder for me to write than the Nurse Florence® series since I am combining information from many different source documents.
What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?
There were many, but one important one discussed by Harvard Health was how a variety of relationships can help boost mental health.
What is the next book in the Nurse Dorothea series that you are working on?
One of the next books to be published is Schizophrenia. We need to play our part to destigmatize mental illness just as Dorothea Dix did in the 1800s.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Essay Contest | YouTube | Dow Creative Enterprises® | Nurse Florence Project | LinkedIn | Amazon
If society wants something we have never had, we’re going to have to do something that has never been done.
The Financial Advisor’s Guide to Building Trust
Michael Oana’s The Financial Advisor’s Guide to Building Trust is a book about replacing transaction with relationship. Its argument is plain but surprisingly elastic: advisors grow not chiefly by proving they’re clever with money, but by becoming memorable, reassuring, and human in the lives of their clients. Oana builds that case through a stream of stories and operating principles, moving from the broad claim that “you don’t sell money, you sell clarity” into a hands-on system of client events, follow-up rhythms, branded touchpoints like his “Toucan 180° Review,” and practical recovery plans for when things go sideways. The book keeps circling one conviction with real persistence: people remember how you made them feel, and that feeling, if tended well, becomes trust, loyalty, referrals, and eventually business.
This is a field manual written by someone who’s spent decades watching rooms, moods, timing, and human nerves. I found that directness refreshing. Oana is best when he’s concrete: the failed Christmas party that drew four people, the rebound chocolate tasting that packed the room, the zoo event that worked because it was thoughtful rather than lavish, the absurdly specific and oddly charming “529 College Night” with its 5:29 timing and ramen bar. Those examples give the book texture. They also save it from the bloodless professionalism that often drains books in this category. The book’s central insight arrives early and then echoes, in slightly different keys, for much of the read. Because the voice is earnest and the examples are authentic, I found myself staying with it.
I think Oana is absolutely right that trust is built socially and emotionally, not just analytically. His best pages understand that money conversations are freighted with shame, fear, pride, grief, and hope, and that an advisor often functions less like a technician than a guide through vulnerable seasons of life. I was especially struck by the way the book treats follow-up not as admin but as moral evidence. The eclipse event at the ballpark, the golf simulator evening that became meaningful only in the days after, even the movie screening interrupted by a family death all reinforce the same point: the real test is not whether an event sparkles, but whether care continues after the room empties.
The Financial Advisor’s Guide to Building Trust is a sincere, useful, and more emotionally intelligent book than its niche premise first suggests. It understands something many business books miss: trust is atmospheric before it is procedural. I wouldn’t recommend it to every reader, but I would recommend it to financial advisors, relationship-driven professionals, and small business owners who want to think more deeply about how care is expressed in practice, not just promised in branding. It’s a practical book with a surprisingly human pulse.
Pages: 132 | ASIN : B0GGTKC8TX
Be Authentic
In Heart’s Dzyer, you share some of the most intimate aspects of your relationship with your boyfriend via letters exchanged during his time in prison. Why was this an important book for you to write?
This was an important book to write because his family was grieving, and I wanted to give them something about him that they may not have known.
I appreciated the candid nature with which you share your experiences. What was the most difficult thing for you to write about?
Even though I was candid and I wrote about difficult things, I did black out some private things that I didn’t think were appropriate to be shared with everyone.
What advice would you give someone who is considering sharing their own memoir?
I would advise that person to be authentic. I kept his spelling inaccuracies because, as someone with dyslexia, it would have been inauthentic to portray him as a perfect speller.
Did you learn anything about yourself in the course of putting Heart’s Dzyer together?
I don’t know if learning is the first thing that comes to mind. If anything, my experience dredged up a lot of emotions. Some days were harder than others. Sometimes I had to take a break because I needed to process emotions. So I guess I learned that I needed to give myself time to process, and I had to be compassionate toward myself as well.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
The Call I Almost Missed: 365 Days Without a Cell Phone and What It Taught Me About Love, Presence, and the Lies We Live
Tommy Short’s The Call I Almost Missed is a yearlong spiritual and emotional memoir told as a sequence of short letters to his daughters, and that shape gives the book its heartbeat. The premise is simple enough to hook you fast: a father turns off his cell phone for 365 days after his daughter asks, “Daddy, why are you always on your phone?” But the book quickly grows beyond experiment or stunt. It becomes a running conversation about attention, fatherhood, ambition, fear, faith, and the private ways people drift away from themselves. The letter format keeps the book intimate, and the repeated “What if” chapter titles give it a reflective rhythm that feels less like an argument and more like a man thinking out loud in real time.
What makes the book work is that Short writes with the urgency of someone who knows he’s been sleepwalking and doesn’t want to waste the wake-up call. He’s strongest when he ties his big ideas to ordinary scenes: a bedtime routine, a haircut gone sideways, a walk with his wife, a quiet panic attack, a rainy stop at the park before school. Those moments keep the book grounded. When he writes, “Presence isn’t proximity. It’s attention,” he lands on the book’s central claim in a way that feels real, not packaged. That line keeps echoing because the whole book is an effort to prove it, one family moment at a time.
The book is also a self-portrait of a man shedding identities that once made him feel valuable. Short writes about officiating basketball, speaking work, masculinity, control, and the reflex to stay reachable at all times. That gives the memoir a real arc. It isn’t just about removing a device. It’s about watching performance fall away and seeing what survives. I liked that he understands this process as both tender and disruptive. The book keeps returning to the cost of becoming more honest, especially in marriage, family life, and faith. Even when he gets intense, there’s a real vulnerability underneath it, and that’s what keeps the book from feeling abstract.
Stylistically, this is a devotional memoir with a motivational streak. Some readers will find the repetition calming; others may find it a bit much, but the repetition is part of the design. The book wants to ponder, not rush your thinking. Short’s best image for that approach comes early, when he says, “This book is not a map. Maps promise routes and destinations. But life rarely works that way.” That line explains the whole reading experience. You don’t move through this book to gather a neat system. You move through it to sit with its questions, and to notice how often it asks you to reconsider the life you’re building while you’re busy trying to manage it.
What I liked most is how clearly the book knows what it wants to be: a record of choosing presence on purpose. It’s a father’s testimony, a spiritual inventory, and a collection of letters meant to outlast the season that produced them. By the end, the phone itself almost feels secondary, which is exactly the point. The real subject is a human life becoming more awake. If you like memoirs that lean into reflection, family, and hard-won tenderness, this one has a lot to offer. It feels personal without being sealed off, and sincere without hiding its rough edges.
Pages: 294 | ASIN : B0GNX3WK9Q
Heart’s Dzyer
Heart’s Dzyer is a memoir built from more than 193 letters exchanged between author Woo-Ae Yi and her former boyfriend Snail between 2011 and 2015, then transcribed after his death in 2023. What begins as a prison pen-pal reconnection between two people who knew each other in middle school slowly opens into something stranger, riskier, and more intimate: a record of affection under surveillance, of art made in confinement, of addiction, depression, longing, manipulation, tenderness, and the way a person’s voice can outlive the body that carried it. The book moves through requests for photo enlargements and tattoo sketches, coded financial favors, flirtation, emotional collapse, private jokes, fox-and-hound imagery, and eventually the ache of loss, all while insisting on the rawness of the original letters rather than smoothing them into a cleaner memoir.
I was surprised by how alive Snail feels on the page, and how uneasy that aliveness can be. He can be lyrical one moment and coercive the next, self-deprecating and charming in the same breath. A line about a “6×9 labyrinth” gives way to instructions for mailing hidden cash; a meditation on loneliness turns into delight over stickers, cartoons, dubstep, or a glowing light box. That instability is the book’s power. Yi doesn’t sanitize him into a noble tragic figure, and I respected that. She lets the contradictions stand. I found that deeply moving, because love here isn’t sentimental at all. It’s full of care, fascination, danger, rescue fantasies, and blurred boundaries. The emotional truth comes precisely from the fact that the book refuses to turn this correspondence into something tidier than it was.
As writing, the book is rough in ways that are sometimes frustrating and often essential. The preserved misspellings, abrupt tonal swings, and sheer accumulation of letters can make the reading experience challenging. But that feels earned. Prison correspondence should not read like a polished novel. It should snag. It should circle. It should sometimes feel like being trapped in somebody else’s head. I also admired the way art keeps breaking through the prose. The requests to enlarge drawings, the graffiti pieces, the tattoo designs, the “Gentle” image caged in chain-link logic, even the odd tenderness of The Fox and the Hound references all give the relationship a visual pulse. The book’s ideas about identity, loneliness, performance, and survival aren’t laid out as arguments, but they accumulate by pressure. By the end, I felt I’d spent time not just with a doomed romance, but with a record of how people improvise meaning when freedom, time, and dignity have all been damaged.
I found Heart’s Dzyer messy, haunting, intimate, and brave. I finished it feeling tender toward both the love it preserves and the pain it refuses to disguise. This is a book I’d recommend to readers who are drawn to epistolary memoirs, prison writing, complicated love stories, and books that leave the seams showing, because those seams are the whole point.
Pages: 574 | ASIN : B0GKY4MF85
Scars and All
Scars and All is a hybrid of memoir, self-help, and conversational reflection, built around one deceptively simple idea: the wounds we carry can either keep us trapped in old pain or become a way of recognizing and easing pain in others. Lara Portelli opens with a stranger dropping milk in a Sydney supermarket, then follows that moment into a chain of encounters, most memorably with Helen at the Hydro Majestic, where a spilled carton becomes the trigger for a buried schoolyard humiliation, and later with Mia, whose mirror-bound self-loathing exposes how easily beauty standards colonize a woman’s inner life. From there, the book widens into chapters on self-harm, invisibility, dress size, cutting remarks, and visible scarring, always circling back to the same invitation: look at your scars honestly, then decide whether they’ll remain reminders or become a map forward.
Portelli writes like someone leaning across the table, saying, listen, this matters. At its best, that makes the book feel intimate in a way many books in this lane never do. Helen’s story, especially the awful convergence of guilt, self-harm, and the old humiliation of chocolate milk in her hair, has genuine force. So does the quieter ache of Mia asking whether she can “compete” with the women she sees in magazines, only to be told, beautifully and bluntly, “You don’t.” I also found the chapter on clothing size unexpectedly effective. The changing-room scene with the ruby-red dress is funny, a little chaotic, and painfully recognizable, which is exactly why it lands. The book is strongest when Portelli lets scenes breathe like that, when the ideas rise out of lived moments instead of arriving as instruction.
The writing has warmth, rhythm, and an unguarded sincerity I appreciated, even when it wanders into reflective detours. There are moments when the narrative shifts from personal storytelling into broader reflections, motivational language, and ideas around NLP, past life regression, and inherited trauma. Those sections didn’t resonate with me quite as strongly as the more intimate, lived scenes, though they still felt consistent with the book’s searching and deeply personal spirit. I trusted Portelli most when she was describing a room, a look, a humiliation, a sudden kindness, the soft light of Holly Difford’s photo shoot, or the raw fact of Turia Pitt refusing to let “5 seconds of pain and agony” define the rest of her life. I never doubted the sincerity underneath everything. The book’s moral imagination is generous. It wants people to be gentler with themselves and more alert to the hurt in others, and that conviction gives it a pulse.
Scars and All is heartfelt and genuinely affecting. I think it succeeds because Portelli is willing to be raw, personal, and earnest in service of a deeply human belief: that pain can enlarge us instead of reducing us. By the time she returns to the image of walking someone “to the safety of that dry space,” the book had earned its tenderness. I’d recommend it most to readers who like personal-development books with memoir blood in them, especially women navigating reinvention, self-worth, body image, or the long afterlife of emotional injury.
Pages: 96 | ASIN : B0FYNQG85V
